We’re in a battle with ourselves to minimize for our kids the damage we’ve done to our environment.
So I was startled to read a recent op-ed chortling with delight over the wonders of petroleum and plastics.
The writer looked like a nice young person, but willfully ignorant. What would she say if her great grandson could speak back through time to her, from his climate-change ravaged world of 2094, and ask how she could have written such things? Sure, our state does currently depend financially on oil and gas; but that’s like taking some dangerous medicine, with serious known side effects, to recover from something worse. (Chemotherapy saves lives, but we don’t rush back for more once the cancer is gone!) Petroleum is a known poison to us and our world, but essential to our civilization. Working to kick that addiction is just as urgent as with fentanyl. In 2094, our descendants will be struggling as desperately to get to Canada, just as some folks now risk everything to get here. Let’s hope they’re treated decently.
I’m told that an indigenous elder, long ago, seeing the influx of white people, said that there would come a day when you could no longer dip your cup in the river and drink. That sounded crazy. Now we take for granted a highly unnatural world in which dipping our cup into almost any river would be unwise. A world where sometimes the air is too thick to breathe. A world in which most people mostly eat “food” full of chemicals bearing little relationship to nutrients.
Gretchen Morgenson’s book, These Are the Plunderers, brilliantly describes how private equity is savaging health care. Barons may do the same for the plunderers of our farmland. Walmart has a share of the grocery market equal to the combined shares of corporations standing 2nd through 8th on that list. The “system” is cheating and poisoning us in a variety of ways.
We try to participate as little as possible. We buy much of our food at the Farmers’ Market. We patronize Toucan as much as we can. We struggled to support the Mountain View Co-Op and mourn its passing. Eat what huge trucks needn’t bring here.
With so many wonderful local restaurants, it’s no sacrifice to avoid not only fast food joints but all the chain restaurants. Coffee at Milagro, Nessa’s, Grounded, and the Bean. Except when traveling, I haven’t set foot in Starbucks for years,.
I prefer the quirky diversity of local places to bland rooms that are identical to thousands around the country; economically, we keep our money here, where local restaurant owners will spend much of their profit, rather than sending it to some coastal corporate headquarters; monopolies, if we let them, monopolies will jack up prices out of sight; and I can ask a local grower how s/he grew what I’m buying, and if something’s wrong my complaint will be heard.
While we carefully watched for Communists, corporations robbed us daily and changed our world. We let it happen. But even now we can resist, and look out for ourselves, by generally favoring what’s local, what’s smaller, and what’s simpler, with a smaller carbon footprint. If feasible, by walking and bicycling, by composting, by limiting water use, by spending a moment reading food ingredients.
By recognizing that all those Super Bowl advertisers aren’t our friends, necessitating a certain alertness, and independent thought.
– 30 –
[The above column appeared Sunday, 31 March, 2024, in the Las Cruces Sun-News and on the newspaper's website and on KRWG’s website, under Local Viewpoints. A shortened and sharpened radio commentary version will air during the week on KRWG (90.1 FM) and on KTAL-LP (101.5 FM, streaming at www.lccommunityradio.org/).]
[Sorry if this column is a little muddled, or scattered, maybe trying to cover several different points. I do feel that corporations have more control of us than they need.]
[Perhaps the first point to make is that our Constitution was admirably constructed to prevent our government from abusing us as the British Empire had abused the colonies, and from having our elected president crown himself king. (Yes, nothing’s foolproof, and a nation of fools certainly could vote in a would-be tyrant, their elected congressfolk and his appointed justices could ignore or weaken all safeguards, and perhaps even cancel the “two terms only” amendment or else let his spouse or flunky “run for President” and technically hold the office while leaving decisions to the tyrant.)
However, our freedoms, health, and well-being now are most infringed by the huge corporations that provide our food, medicines, entertainment, clothing, transportation, means of communication, household goods, air and water pollution, and assorted trinkets and poisons. Mindless state governments are a distant second, although they tend to be more openly vicious and their legal arrows sure hurt plenty of women, poor folk, and folks with unconventional genders.
Because our constitution sees corporations and “private property,” and even “persons,” it was written to protect them rather than control them and hold them to account. Similarly, it was written by the representatives of thirteen states to protect those states as much as the people, and didn’t even bother with the Bill of Rights until public sentiment seemed to require it as a condition for adoption of the document.
But that’s another potential column.
Fact is, we have partnered with profit-seeking corporations and politicians often paid by those corporations to form ourselves an unhealthy and inequitable society. I guess I connect up several problems with that because I feel strongly about all of them. Not all are even anyone’s conscious intent, but they happen. As mentioned, we can dip our drinking cup in few rivers, and often can’t drink our own municipal drinking water. Communities are dissolving under the sad combination of having more and more decisions about us made by corporate chiefs and political flunkies, local news deserts getting further dried out by corporate recognition that local newspapers and radio discussion isn’t terribly profitable, we are subject to monopoly pricing, and various forms of pollution. Consequences include not only dying species, rampant illness, and incresing inequalities, but a loss of community, a loss of autonomy, a loss of our connection with nature, including our own natures. ]
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